I'm a transgender girl happily on a journey to looking better, being more feminized and overcoming adversity. Whether in your teens or way beyond, if you’re a transgender girl, this is for you. Like an embassy in a hostile land, this is the place to gain strength, to get empowering information and to belong. I made this place based on what I've learned; I hope it helps you. Welcome home.

Category Archives: Is Life Harder as a T-Girl?

Yes, I happen to be a t-girl. And that’s becoming less and less relevant in the grand scheme of things.

By choice and action, my life is full and rich. Not financially … but that’s OK. It’s not that I don’t value material wealth. Well-earned money solves the sort of problems that I enjoy having solved by such money. I’m all for it. But there’s a lot to my life, aside from the many and varied ways in which I earn my living, and keep trying to do better. And normally, I omit all of that from my blog and I try to write about things that might help other t-girls.

Events and thoughts that are not relevant to this t-girl-themed blog, in isolation, I omit. Perhaps in a t-girl blog you don’t really wanna read about … well, let’s analyze the last “24 hours in the life of a girl.”

Maybe it’s not relevant how this girl spent hours on end in personal conversation, learning from someone who ran a successful business empire for many years. Or how this girl went to the 5-Star Saloon, an LGBTQ friendly bar in Reno, NV. Or how she walked onto their informal stripper-pole stage wearing conservative but elegant clothing under which she wore a hot skimpy stripper dress. Or how she stripped down to that dress while dancing seductively in 6″ stilettoes while half a dozen guys were watching and cheering appreciatively. Or how she spent the night in the nude in a queen-sized bed in the company of another nude girl who is a pretty, level-headed, successful, retired porn star. Or how (yes, this is still not an R-rated blog) they really were just friendly and didn’t have sex (yes, really, girls can sleep together and … literally just sleep together … we do that). Or how she managed to stay in a really nice hotel room last night. Or how she enjoyed a dip in their pool and hot tub at 9 a.m. while wearing a sexy, elegant, one-piece American-flag swimsuit. Or how 90 minutes later she was lying on gravel underneath a dirty 30-year old BMW in a dry, dusty junkyard, yanking hard on a huge steel wrench, trying to get its drive shaft removed so she could flip it for a profit. Or how she drove 250 miles today, including over the 6800-foot-elevation Sierra Nevada Donner Pass in a 25-year old Volvo station wagon that she’s fixing up. Or how she worked on a million-dollar piece of complex custom database software that she’d designed 15 years ago and it’s still running. Or how she managed to coordinate the efforts of various wonderful people to get the servers of her website company going again after a massive outage. Or how she concluded a business deal likely to net her another $2,000 per month from now on. Or how she tactically advised a friend who’s in a difficult business crisis. All in the last 24 hours.

If that’s not a full and rich life, I can’t imagine what would be.

And yet, none of this is specific to the life of, specifically, a t-girl. She’s just a girl — a girl who embraces life and tries to make the most of it, and has an experience-rich life as consequence. And yes, that girl is me.

Because there is nothing in the above that’s specific to me being a t-girl … basically a girl with unusual hormones and unusual plumbing … the articles in this blog don’t focus on my many adventures if they’re not specifically relevant to life as a t-girl. And yet, as a whole, maybe they are.

If you are a t-girl, odds are that you’ve had a hard life. But so have a great many people. If you are a t-girl, odds are that you do or did feel self-conscious about your looks. But so have a great many people. So the way I see it is … you can let all the adversity get to you or you can use it to get stronger.

In space, astronauts (or to be more precise, cosmonauts) have found that their muscles slowly atrophy due to the lack of gravity that makes them work against resistance when they move. Resistance, if you work against it, makes you stronger, is the point of this analogy. That’s what I’m getting at in this article. I’ve faced many hurdles and I’ve fallen down a lot. But I’ve always gotten back up again. If I could, then maybe you can too.

If you’re a t-girl and life is hard, I hope you can draw inspiration from my story. About 18 months ago I was about to be homeless, very broke, with a terrible credit rating and no hope of being able to rent any place to stay, anywhere, any time soon. It was mid-December, too cold to live even in my 25-year old Ford van. And, before you feel sorry for me, consider that my situation was not some tragedy thrust upon me by a cruel universe but just the simple consequence of a totally avoidable sequence of events that, when they occurred, I richly deserved. I’d simply chosen to mismanage my life to the extent that the events ended up playing out like that as a purely logical consequence.

Then, I made things worse. A nice friend lent me a humble place to stay, and the person whom I bribed to help me move my humble furniture into my humble new place ended up being, I found out, truly homeless. I felt sorry for him. Over that Christmas holiday, I gave him a place to stay (my couch) and I fed him and even lent him what little money I had left, to help him out — a dumb mistake since his stories turned out to be manipulative fabrications and he vanished right before the house of cards, his pack of lies, collapsed. I never saw him or that money again.

I was already in a hole before I helped him out, and then I’d just dug myself a deeper hole yet. And please don’t comment that it had been a good thing to do. It had been a dumb thing to do. Benevolence is fine and good, with a worthy beneficiary. I chose a rotten scoundrel instead. It was, simply, yet another bad decision. So, I was in a bad situation and the person to blame was right there in the mirror.

It reminds me of the saying: “Things happen for a reason. And the reason is typically that you’re stupid and you make bad decisions.”

Trudat.

However, I could also make better decisions. I started doing so. Of course, their effects were good. Then, these good effects compounded. Today, a year-and-a-half later, my finances are still a mess, but I’m otherwise in good shape. There’s even reason to be optimistic on the financial front, too.

I had learned from this difficult time. I had become stronger without becoming jaded. And I had started making better decisions.

That’s my hope for every t-girl who’s struggling … maybe you’re having to struggle more than most, but if you keep struggling intelligently and persistently, you’re also gaining strength, more than most. That strength might well propel you through your current crisis and beyond, to a much happier situation.

For context: I manage my own tiny empire of small businesses, all of which were in dire financial straits before I transitioned, and a year later they still are, but no worse, and arguably better.

* * *

Many of my business relationships are better even though people are aware I’m a transgender girl. These relationships range culturally from people who buy used auto parts to those who buy custom database software. My staff and long-term clients and family have worked through their issues with my transition. I’ve been warned by many that the roof would cave in when folks find out that I’m a transgender girl, and with each self-outing I’d dread the relationship ending, and every time it hasn’t (though in a few cases, it required some candor and reasoning). With genetically integrated females, the business relationships are now vastly warmer and more collaborative, and with males I generally feel … almost as if I’m protected. Most men are much nicer to me now.

Personally, I feel so much happier now that I live as the girl I am. I’m vastly more healthy, energized and productive … in contrast, I was depressed about the male image in the mirror, a bit more than a year ago.

* * *

I’m also friends with many transgender girls nowadays, and I can see how the process can psychologically be a downward spiral to where the only option she thinks she’s professionally good for is escorting, and even in that context, there are downward spirals that get worse and worse.

I also have bad days and I sometimes still feel overwhelmed and it gets to me, at least enough to where I relate to where the downward spiral would go and what it would feel like. I’ve been in a store where some customers loudly remarked about the freak show and commiserated with the folks behind the counter because they were stuck there and had to deal with me whereas the customers were free to leave. So, yes, it’s hard. In the many, many places where bigoted people can close the doors, those doors are now closed to me.

* * *

For many girls like me, is it a struggle and escorting might well the most viable way and not a fun choice? Yes. I have had weeks in which I either got at least a few stripper or escorting gigs or I’d be bouncing checks, and in weeks like that, every time-waster is a source of huge frustration.

As an example, I cleared my entire late-night schedule for one gentleman who was going to meet me at 11 p.m. or so. I was ready (which takes me a couple of hours). I waited and waited. At a few minutes after midnight, he finally contacted me to come over, but then conveyed he wanted the entire interaction to be free of charge. If he were represented by a voodoo doll that night, I’d have made it look like a porcupine.

At the bottom of the cash flow pecking order, life can be damn hard. Nowadays, my days begin mid-morning and end at 3 or 4 a.m. and in spite of working so hard, I’m still barely making it, cash flow wise.

* * *

But, dammit, I’m going to keep struggling until I make it and to where escorting is purely for fun. And if I can make it, probably most girls can. In the end, whether or not a person makes it comes down to volition — choosing to be too stubborn to give up — ever.

And compared to that unstoppable force, however hard the journey is, and how many the obstacles are … that really becomes irrelevant.